Grace Hooper seated at a mainframe. angle=60,lower_threshold=0.2,upper_threshold=1.0

Types of data

The types of data present as a part of the Mainframe: Past-Present project will consist primarily of images and text. Images will be stored as JPEGs while text will be rendered from markdown. We may have video content embedded in the website, which would be stored on a publicly accessible Vimeo collection. Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, hex editors, and software libraries like pixelsort and glitch-this will be used in deformance of original archival content. During archival material collection, Dropbox will be used to share images from archives and magazines. All images and writing will hosted on a publicly visible Github repository, which will be mirrored on GitLab for backup/redundancy, and an alternative hosting platform.

Standards for documentation & metadata

Deformance process will be documented as a part of the website content. Both Wax and CollectionBuilder are informed by FAIR Principles for Library, Archive and Museum Collections. Images will follow the naming convention of description_source_year or source_volume_edition_page#_year. Directory structure and location for images and texts are prescribed by the frameworks mentioned above, which we will follow absent any argument for changing those defaults. Metadata for the collection will be available to browse on the website, and will be downloaded as a csv.

Data reuse, accessibility, sharing

Images, text, and website code will be shared in git repository hosting sites Github and GitLab, and available for cloning and forking via git. Original archival images and deformanced versions will be available for download from a web browser or via the git repo. If video content is provided in the archive, instructions for using youtube-dl will be written and available. Due to the experimental nature of this project, reuse is permissible under the FreeBSD license.

Preservation & long term access

Mainframes: Past-Present will be available on both Github and GitLab, where hosting is free. In the event that we don’t have funding for a domain name, the archives will still be accessible. If desirable, we will create a BagIt bag for the project with bagit-python to be stored at the CUNY’s Mina Rees Library.